Festival Mental

Background

MENTAL Festival - Cinema, Arts and Information, is co-produced by Safe Space Portugal, a non-profit organization founded in 2017 to combat illiteracy about mental health. It takes place every year and involves a vast team of professionals and volunteers who accompany the production of plays, dancing, musical concerts and a whole international exhibition of short films. The core of the festival are the M-Talks, panels of guests who discuss the themes chosen for each edition, highlighted by a carefully chosen feature film.

Each member of the production team chooses their place of work, as Mental also has an annual production, which takes place all over the country. Due to this peculiarity, it was necessary to find a storage solution that was very practical and simple to use for everyone, but that also provided high security.

Challenges

João Gata, director of the festival, explains that “as an international showcase for short and mid-length films, we receive hundreds of films every year, which are carefully selected and stored in both MP4 and DCP formats. We also have dozens of hours of video recordings of all the M-Talks and other content, as well as all the graphic design materials, from brochures to video segments and all the social media posts. So every year we have a few more terabytes of content that has to be available to everyone on the team at all times. At the same time, in order to receive files of tens of gigabytes, such as short films, it was essential to have a physical destination so that the filmmakers could upload them directly.”

Solution

Coming with an Intel® Celeron® N5095 quad-core processor and 8 GB DDR4 memory, the high-performing TS-364 NAS provides the Festival Mental production team with unified content storage for management and sharing. It not only addresses the growing need for storage but also boosts the speed and productivity of collaboration across multiple locations. “QNAP solved all of these issues for us in one fell swoop with the TS-364 three-bay model, which has proved to be a real partner for our needs in its first year of use”, says João.

In addition to promoting efficient collaboration, QNAP NAS also enables high accessibility and security for files . “Access is facilitated by the creation of user groups with dedicated permissions, and also useful is the creation of power schedules to keep the NAS active when it is being accessed across different time zones,” says João. They also use the Qmanager mobile app to access the NAS remotely for necessary security updates or other technical needs enabling them to easily manage and maintain resilience.

Result

With the TS-364 NAS solution, the team can achieve the full benefit of collaboration without wasting time and effort to organize user access. João Gata, Director of Festival Mental, says “This solution has made it possible for the festival team to work in a more agile and streamlined way, which is extremely important given the fact that this is a small team working to tight deadlines.”

Moreover, the festival team adopts the myQNAPcloud service to enhance the smoothness of data transmission which not only increases operational efficiency but also enables them to collaborate remotely and securely. “We now have a sub-domain on myQNAPcloud.com as it is much more professional than using free cloud tools, which we used until now to receive the files of the films on show during the festival. What's more, we've streamlined processes here too, as uploads are made directly to a resource on our local network, thus avoiding that we waste time on further downloads, ” says João.

“This is the reason that I say that QNAP is not just a piece of technological equipment, but an integral part of the Festival's technical team”.